This is the third resurrection of this blog in as many years however this time I have a more serious incentive than before to keep the blog going and chart my journey to what will be a huge achievement in my life.
To begin thinking about bringing the blog back to life again, I sat down and had a really good think about my fitness and in particular how it has evolved over the course of my life. When I was a kid, I was relatively fit. I was no Usain Bolt but I played football, went riding on my bike and ran around whenever the opportunity presented itself. When I was around 7 or 8, everything seemed to change and all of a sudden my fitness evaporated. I found I couldn't run for any extended period of time and a staple of school sports day was seeing me struggle to the finish line in last place.
Around this time, I also started to notice that when I was doing exercise, my chest would become very tight and it would be difficult to breathe comfortably. A visit to the doctor resulted in me finding out that I have a mild form of asthma which is brought on either by strenuous exercise or from allergies. As I went through secondary school, exercise took even further of a back seat in my priorities, with me preferring to spend my time walking the streets with friends on a night or playing on the Playstation for hours at a time.
This trend continued on through college and university, where I found myself using excuses to not exercise while at the same time eating anything that I wanted. During my first year of university it was common place for me to have my dinner at Mcdonalds around three times a week. Fast forward a few more years and around 2009/2010 I finally signed up for the gym. By this time my weight was pushing around 19 stone and my asthma had become a little worse (I have to use my inhaler most days)
This was really the first time in my life that I had paid attention to my weight and actively taken steps to track it and try and bring it down. I managed to bring my weight down to 17 stone which was mainly due to the exercise I was doing in preparation for a 5k run which up to then was the most I had ever ran. I completed the run and decided to take a couple of weeks off from the exercise as a reward for having achieved something I hadn't done before. Weeks turned into months and pretty soon the gym membership was cancelled and I was back into old habits.
Fast forward again to May 2012 and all the weight I had lost was put back on and then some. At the start of May I weighed 19st 3lbs and was bigger than I have probably ever been in my life and I knew that something had to change somewhere. After hearing and seeing the success that lots of other people have had with the program, I decided to give Weight Watchers a try. This initially was a difficult decision as the way I saw it, WW was something that only women did.
However immediately I saw the success and although the success had come from things I could have done on my own, incentive and motivation is often the difficult thing to find and I found that knowing I had to weigh myself each week and knowing I had to stick within a daily set of guidelines great motivation and I was seeing the changes.
It is 9 months since I started on WW and in that time I have lost just less than 3 1/2 stone and I my weight is currently at its lowest for probably about 10 years. Because of my success, I began to feel like I need to give myself a challenge and that is where I was drawn back to the blog.
When the blog was first started I set myself 4 goals which I wanted to try and achieve, the goals were:
- Fit into the next waist size down jeans
- Fit into large size t-shirts
- Get my BMI down into the overweight band
- Take part in the Great North Run
At the time of writing, I have smashed two of these challenges. In nine months I have dropped 2 jean sizes and all new shirts I buy are now large rather than extra large. I need to lose only seven more pounds before my weight gets into the overweight category and last month, I registered to participate in the Great North Run. I received confirmation that I will be taking part in the run on the 15th September which is a huge challenge for me but one I am looking forward to.
I have already taken very small steps to begin my training but this is something that I will be stepping up over the course of the next couple of weeks. I am going to use the blog both as a way to track my own progress over the coming weeks but also for anyone that is interested in the journey of an overweight and unfit person to running a a half marathon.
The following weeks and months are going to be tough but I hope that anyone who reads this blog enjoys reading about my journey.
